Loewenstern Fellowships enable Rice students to transcend boundaries
International service trips impact students, world

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

It took a trip overseas for Rice student Harrison Nguyen to finally feel at home. Supported by a Loewenstern Fellowship this summer, Nguyen ventured to Vietnam, exactly 30 years after his parents had escaped that country on a crowded fishing boat.

“As they left, they swore to never look back,” Nguyen said. “For me, however, my entire life, I have spoken its language, eaten its food, practiced its customs and celebrated its traditions, but I had never been able to experience its land and its environment.”

	Harrison Nguyen found the Loewenstern Fellowship fused two important aspects of his life: service and culture. Here he feeds a child in an orphanage primarily for handicapped children disabled by the aftereffects of the Vietnam War.

The Hanszen College junior found that long-sought-after opportunity in the Loewenstern Fellowship program, which fused two important aspects of his life: service and culture. Made possible by the Community Involvement Center and established by a gift from alumnus Walter Loewenstern ’58, the competitive fellowships provide stipends for students to volunteer abroad through direct service, mentorship or civic research and design placements. Direct service ranges from getting involved with community-building construction work and domestic violence intervention programs to implementing grassroots educational campaigns and serving meals to the homeless.

Mentorship placements are modeled after a Leadership Rice program in which a student partners with a mentor who is an effective, ethical leader within a service-oriented organization. Students in the civic research and design track of the fellowships conduct faculty-supervised, community-based research or design projects that will benefit the communities they serve.

“I believed that a Loewenstern Fellowship would transcend traditional boundaries,” Nguyen said. “People in Third World countries, such as those in my ancestors’ home, are simply in greater need. We in the United States take for granted many of our privileges: food, water, home and, the one my father always emphasized, education. As Greg Mortenson, author of last year’s common reading book, ‘Three Cups of Tea,’ said, education is the key to peace and the end to suffering.”

With that in mind, Ngyuen used his fellowship to teach English at an underprivileged elementary school, an undersupplied hospital and an orphanage primarily for handicapped children disabled by the aftereffects of the Vietnam War.

“It’s been an especially personal experience because I know that my father was once in the same position as many of the people suffering in Vietnam without resources and an education,” he said.

Peruvian charms

Like Nguyen, Emily Romano taught English abroad through the fellowship program. Stationed in Calca, a small city in the Sacred Valley of Peru, she spent a great deal of time immersing herself in Peruvian culture to better understand her students. The understanding, she feels, is essential in equipping the students with tools that will last long after she leaves.

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“I believe in the mission of the Loewenstern Fellowships,” said Romano, a Jones College senior. “All of the programs that the fellowship supports deal with sustainable development in some way. It is important to me that volunteer work does not only involve handouts; service work needs to teach people how to better themselves and their future.”

Though she knew that she’d never be able to make the students fluent in English in one summer, she hoped that she could encourage students to at least continue in English education.

“They live in one of the top tourist destinations in the world,” Romano said. “If they can learn to speak English on at least a conversational level, a whole host of careers are open to them. It would also be possible then for them to pursue higher education in an English-speaking country, such as the United States.”

The teaching experience is nothing new for Romano. While still in high school, she spent a summer in rural Honduras teaching and working on a community development project. This past school year she spent her Fridays working at a local middle school.

“The Loewenstern Fellowship is highly selective,” said Mac Griswold, director of the Community Involvement Center. “Our students have demonstrated that they have not only the desire to travel but also to serve others and to share the experience with the Rice University community. It is easy to see how passionate they are about their desire to serve. For some, it is a value that was instilled in them by their families, communities of faith or peer groups, but for others, it is rooted in an intellectual curiosity that has expanded into a desire to solve problems.”

Clinical work

Solving problems is what led Dennis Shung to a health clinic in a relatively poor district on the outskirts of Cusco, Peru. In addition to clinic duties, he is helping to create a patient-history database using Microsoft programs to facilitate digitizing records and tracking patients.

“It’s been an incredible opportunity to apply the lessons learned in the United States and see how they stand up in a completely foreign environment, where expectations of service work, perceptions of volunteers and resource availability were radically different,” said Shung, a Sid Richardson College senior. “This has tested and strengthened my character and given me a better recognition of what service means. For example, one of my original perceptions of service as using my best existing talent to serve the population has attained a new meaning. Now, service really means meeting their needs to the best of my ability, even if it means learning a whole new skill.”

During his time in Peru, Shung also helped implement health-education classes in a home for abandoned and maltreated children. As part of those efforts too, he traveled to mountain communities twice a month on a health campaign, bringing basic supplies and discussing how people can keep healthy. The Hispanic studies major faced some challenges reaching out to the community, but his drive to help aided him in overcoming cultural barriers.

Many of the Loewenstern Fellows this year taught English to and worked with children in underprivileged communities throughout the world.

“I’ve learned so much about how to relate to people in Peru, how to make them feel comfortable and how to respectfully approach and build relationships with them,” Shung said. “I feel that now I have a better grasp on the problems facing Latin American society.”

The cultural immersion was especially rewarding for Shung, who came to understand that a culture and civilization is buttressed by relationships and daily interactions that go far beyond purely academic study. From his Rice classes, he had a basic understanding of how Hispanic society functioned, but after staying with a family and working in the community there, he was surprised at how shallow his personal understanding was.

“Our fellows have a unique capacity to connect with individuals — not just the issues but the individuals — in the communities they serve,” Griswold said. “These connections are what help make the Loewenstern Fellowship so impactful on the students themselves but also the people they ultimately serve.”

Relationship building

Personal connections got Rodolfo Velasquez Lim through the stress of teaching in a foreign country. The Rice senior volunteered with Orphanage Outreach, an organization based in Monte Cristi, the Dominican Republic. The main focus of his placement was teaching at public schools.

Each week he and a team of other volunteers went to a different school to teach English. Though he lacked teaching experience, he was told he was qualified simply because he spoke English. Velasquez Lim, a Jones College senior, taught lessons about colors, numbers, the alphabet, health, sports and music.

But his favorite moments occurred outside the classroom on a small basketball court near the grounds of the orphanage where more than 40 boys and girls lived.

“My favorite times were spent with them, playing basketball and baseball, using coloring books, playing around in general and talking,” Velasquez Lim said. “Sitting around and watching the kids provided hours of entertainment. The friendships I formed there were more than I ever hoped for. Each one’s strong personality has been etched into my mind, and I really want to return to play with them again.”

His work in the Dominican Republic was in sharp contrast to his work on campus as a mechanical engineering major. However, it built on a commitment to helping children that he established while at Rice. A member of the Wharton Elementary and Rice Mentoring program (WARM), he worked with others to conduct an after-school program. Next year, as an officer of WARM, he plans to incorporate some of the activities he did with the children in the Dominican Republic.

“I saw conditions much less prosperous than what I am used to seeing, forcing me to be flexible and creative with the resources available,” Velasquez Lim said. “I also saw numerous new activities being done with the kids as I worked with more than 100 creative volunteers from around the world in my two months. I can also say I attempted to control some of the rowdiest children in the world.”

Challenges abound

Rowdy behavior wasn’t the only challenge fellows had to overcome. Being a stranger in a foreign land comes with its share of hardships. As Americans, the fellows said, they often stuck out and had to adjust to different foods and cultural mentalities. Romano’s greatest obstacle was the ways plans would change at a moment’s notice.

“One of the challenges of international service is the ability to be flexible and change plans,” Romano said. “I sometimes have trouble ‘going with the flow,’ so the schedule issues were a little stressful. But I have to remind myself that nothing ever goes according to plan.”

Shung recalled experiencing a bit of culture shock and trouble adapting to the language. He felt those he served looked at him differently because he was American and didn’t have the same language capabilities. He said he relied on his Rice experience to get him through those tough times.

“My Rice education has given me some tools, such as an awareness of the health situation through my global health classes, cultural literacy through Hispanic studies classes and a basic understanding of medicine through biochemistry,” Shung said. “Furthermore, the human interaction through volunteer service at Rice has allowed me to become more flexible and able to build relationships easily.”

The climate in the Dominican Republic was a hurdle Velasquez Lim had to overcome. He did so by resigning himself to sweating and wearing mosquito repellent all the time. An unexpected difficulty proved to be the most frustrating.

“Wherever we traveled, people called out ‘Americano!'” Velasquez Lim recalled. “At first, one felt like a celebrity, but it continued relentlessly, and I wished people would just accept the fact that we were different and move on.”

Being labeled as an American was harrowing at times for Nguyen too. He was playing basketball with a group of Vietnamese teenagers who only saw him as a walking ATM.

“To them, I was just a person who they could overcharge, rip off, deceive and, unfortunately, steal money from,” Nguyen said. “They did not see me as a Vietnamese boy desperate to assimilate into what he labeled his own culture; no, rarely did they ever give me the time of day without trying to do something to get their hands in my pockets.”

The Vietnamese children, however, provided refuge for Nguyen as he fought the insensitivities of others.

“When I first met the children I played with at the orphanage, they did not ask me if I could give them money,” he recalled. “Their first question was ‘Do you like yogurt?’ They all rushed to give me mini paper contraptions that they made and joked with me that they were all 40 years old. I knew that these young children were something truly special.

“None of them had shoes, and most of them seemed to suffer from mysterious rashes, but they are so content. They were amazed at my watch and my iPod. I told them I wished I could buy one for every single one of them, but they told me that it was okay and they would be happy as long as I came every afternoon to play with them.

“I came to Vietnam with the general goal of teaching English to my people, but I have now refined my focus to simply doing anything I can to influence the lives of the Vietnamese children,” Nguyen said.

It’s the dedication and tenacity of the fellows like Nguyen that make the Loewenstern program so meaningful beyond the Rice community. It seems like wherever the fellows go, they bring back pieces of the oft-forgotten towns that create the global community.